seangabb
Published 11 Feb 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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May 10, 2022
The Crusades: Part 4 — Life in Outremer
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May 7, 2022
The Crusades: Part 3 — The Crusader States
seangabb
Published 6 Feb 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)
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May 3, 2022
The Crusades: Part 2 – The First Crusade
seangabb
Published 5 Feb 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)
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April 26, 2022
The Crusades: Part 1 – The Long Prehistory
seangabb
Published 23 Jan 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)
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April 25, 2022
QotD: The 15th century as a “mulligan”
I can’t really recommend Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars or Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages as casual reading — you don’t have to be a specialist in the field to appreciate them (I’m not), but it surely helps. Nonetheless they’re worth a browse (provided you can find them), for a glimpse inside the head of a once vital, but now senescent, culture.
As I’ve written here before, the 15th century makes much more sense if you consider it a “mulligan” century, a do-over — an attempt to stuff the Early Modern cat back into the High Medieval bag in the wake of the Black Death. One cannot, of course, say that thus-and-such should’ve happened in history — history is the study of what actually did happen — but it’s clear that the Black Death was a giant hiccup in the otherwise “natural” progression from Middle Ages to Early Modern. It was all there in embryo in 1340; had the Black Death not hit the pause button for half a century, the great ructions of the early 1500s would’ve hit in the early 1400s. And they no doubt would’ve been a lot less severe, too — without the Black Death, the “Martin Luther” of 1417 might’ve been one of the great reforming Popes.
Read Huizinga or Duffy, and you get the overwhelming impression of bright children playing dress up. Everything’s cranked way past eleven. Like kids, they know that grownups do these things, and because they’re bright kids they have some idea why grownups do it … but not really, and the nuances utterly escape them. Huizinga tells the story of some churchman who ostentatiously drinks every drink he’s given in five swallows, one for each of Jesus’s wounds … obnoxious enough, but then he goes that characteristically Late Medieval extra mile — because both blood and water flowed from Christ’s side, he takes the second swallow in two gulps.
Knights vow to not open one of their eyes until they’ve met the Turk in battle. Another churchman rails against the kitschy little figurines found in burghers’ homes, a carving of the Virgin Mary with a door in her stomach. You open it up, and there’s the Trinity. Bad enough, but again the Late Medieval twist: He’s not upset at the figure as such (even though it’s the next best thing to idolatry); he’s pissed because you see the entire Trinity there, and not just Jesus, as is theologically proper. Speaking of Mary, academics debate, in all apparent seriousness, whether or not she was an “active participant” in Our Lord’s conception. And so on: Creeping to the Cross, endless novenas and rosaries and vigils, the whole spastically ostentatious public piety of the devotio moderna. The Imitation of Christ is great, everyone should read it, but imagine people doing all that in public, and not in the cloister as Kempis intended.
The old, exhausted, Alzheimery (it’s a word) dregs of a once vital and vibrant spirituality. Sound familiar?
Severian, “Alt Discussion Thread: Sacraments and Superstitions”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-18.
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April 19, 2022
QotD: “Bog iron” in ancient and medieval society
One distinction here is between bog iron and iron in ore deposits. Bog iron is formed when ground-water picks up iron from iron-ore deposits, where that iron is then oxidized under acidic conditions to form chunks of iron minerals (goethite, magnetite, hematite, etc.), typically in smallish chunks. Bog iron is much easier to smelt because it contains fewer impurities than iron ore in rock deposits, but the quantity of iron available from bog iron is relatively low (although actually renewable, unlike mines; a bog can be harvested for iron again after a few decades as the processes which produce the bog iron continue). Because of its low output, bog iron tends to be an important part of the iron supply only when production is relatively low, such as during the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Europe, or the early medieval period.
But what I want to stress here at the outset is that while the local variety of iron may vary based on conditions, iron ores are sufficiently common that prior to the industrial revolution, it wasn’t generally necessary to trade or transport them over long distances because most areas have deposits. There are some exceptions (Japan is notoriously mineral poor – my limited geological understanding is that this is common in volcanic land formations – and while it does have some iron deposits, they are few and relatively small), but for the most part, getting iron ore was not hard. As we’ll see, timber availability was actually often a more pressing limitation on iron exploitation than the ore itself […]
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.
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April 17, 2022
Queen Victoria’s Easter Cake
Tasting History with Max Miller
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April 2, 2022
QotD: The pre-modern farming household
At the same time that households were large (by modern standards), the farms they tilled were, by modern standards, very small. The normal size of a Roman household small farm is generally estimated between 5 and 8 iugera (a Roman measurement of land, roughly 3 to 5 acres); in pre-Han Northern China (where wheat and millet, not rice, were the staple crops), the figure was “one hundred mu (4.764 acres)” – essentially the same. In Languedoc, a study of Saint-Thibery in 1460 showed 118 households (out of 189) on farms of less than 20 setérée (12 acres or so; the setérée appears to be an inexact unit of measurement); 96 of them were on less than 10 setérée (about 6 acres). So while there is a lot of variation, by and large it seems like the largest cluster of household farms tend to be around 3 to 8 acres or so; 5 acre farms are a good “average” small farm.
This coincidence of normal farm size and family size is not an accident, but essentially represents multi-generational family units occupying the smallest possible farms which could support them. The pressures that produce this result are not hard to grasp: families with multiple children and a farm large enough to split between them might do so, while families without enough land to split are likely to cluster around the farm they have. Pre-modern societies typically have only limited opportunities for wage labor (which are often lower status and worse in conditions than peasant farming!), so if the extended family unit can cluster on a single farm too small to split up, it will (with exception for the occasional adventurous type who sets off for high-risk occupations like soldier or bandit).
Now to be clear that doesn’t mean the farm sizes are uniform, because they aren’t. There is tremendous variation and obviously the difference between a 10 acre small farm and a 5 acre small farm is half of the farm. Moreover, in most of the communities you will have significant gaps between the poor peasants (whose farms are often very small, even by these measures), the average peasant farmer, and “rich peasants” who might have a somewhat (but often not massively so) larger farm and access to more farming capital (particularly draft animals). […] Nevertheless, what I want to stress is that these fairly small – 3-8 acres of so – farms with an extended family unit on it make up the vast majority of farming households and most of the rural population, even if they do not control most of the land (for instance in that Languedoc village, more than half of the land was held by households with more than 20 setérée a piece, so a handful of those “rich peasants” with larger accumulations effectively dominated the village’s landholding […]).
This is our workforce and we’re going to spend this entire essay talking about them. Why? Because these folks – these farmers – make up the majority of the population of basically all agrarian societies in the pre-modern period. And when I say “the majority” I mean the vast majority, on the order of 80-90% in many cases.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
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March 29, 2022
Giving up vegetables for Lent
Felipe Fernández-Armesto on updating the traditional Christian observance of Lent for our virtue-signalling, social media age:
“Bruegel the Elder, Fight between Carnival and Lent, detail 6” by f_snarfel is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
For Lent, I am abstaining from vegetables. It may seem counter-intuitive, because “Carnival” or “Carni Vale” — which the English in their glum way call “Shrove Tuesday” and the French, more cheerfully, call “Mardi Gras” — means “Goodbye to Meat”.
The worldly, historic purpose of Lent is to eke out deficient livestock, doomed, unless slaughtered, to die, emaciated and inedible, on sparse or frozen pastures. Nowadays, however, vegetables seem a sacrifice both reasonable and pious.
If I wanted to be lampooned in Private Eye, I’d say that vegetables are the new meat: marketed as dietetically superior, and flattering to a moral form of snobbery.
Like meat in the old days, they are the preferred food of people who want to look down on the rest of us. Flesh and fish are now humbling meals, consumed in self-abasement. “Veganuary” and “Dry January” — wicked, secularist attempts to subvert the sanctity of Lent — repel me from conventional kinds of penance.
I want to defy the absurd propaganda of meat-haters, who try to shame the ill-informed into vegetarianism with mendacious allegations about the environmental cost of carnivorism. Scientifically, they’re on a par with Pythagoras’s denunciation of “passion proteins” and the meat-phobic campaigns of the nineteenth-century evangelists who hawked joyless, overpriced breakfast cereals.
I also want to expose the folly of people who, in flight from the butcher’s shop, grab textured soy concentrate from supermarket shelves: theirs is the idiocy of the ersatz. If you want something like meat, have meat. If you don’t want meat, have something unlike it. My sacrifice would be greater, of course, if I disliked rare steaks and juicy roasts. But I like vegetables, too. So that’s all right.
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March 23, 2022
QotD: Fansplaining that feudalism is bad
Portrayal is not promulgation, people.
That said, I’ve spent thirty years learning that no writer, be they ever so clear and plain, can control how readers read, or misread, their texts. Reading is a dance, not a march. If some readers step on one’s feet, well, it’s still better than sitting by the wall … Usually.
Lois McMaster Bujold, “Lois McMaster Bujold on Fanzines, Cover Art, and the Best Vorkosigan Planet”, Tor.com, 2017-11-02.
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March 7, 2022
QotD: Historical fiction and fantasy works usually leave out the vast majority of the people who did all the work
But the actual human landscape of the pre-modern period was defined – in agrarian societies, at least – by vast numbers of farms and farmers. Their work proceeded on this cyclical basis, from plowing to sowing to weeding to harvesting and threshing to storage and then back again. Religious observances and social festivals were in turn organized around that calendar (it is not an accident how many Holy Days and big festivals seem to cluster around the harvest season in late Autumn/early Winter, or in Spring). The uneven labor demands of this cycle (intense in plowing and reaping, but easier in between) in turn also provided for the background hum of much early urban life, where the “cities” were for the most part just large towns surrounded by farmland (where often the folks living in the cities might work farmland just outside of the gates). People looked forward to festivals and events organized along the agricultural calendar, to the opportunities a good harvest might provide them to do things like get married or expand their farms. The human drama that defines our lives was no less real for the men and women who toiled in the fields or the farmhouses.
And of course all of this activity was necessary to support literally any other kind of activity.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part III: Actually Farming”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-06.
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February 7, 2022
History Summarized: Vikings
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Jul 2017Huge thanks to our friend Shad at Shadiversity! Check out his channel for historical weaponry and much more: https://www.youtube.com/user/shadmbrooks
Grab your swords and hop in your longboats, because it’s time to learn a thing or two about the Vikings!
This video was produced with assistance from the Boston University Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.
Thanks to patron Karl Erik L Hoftaniska for suggesting this topic!
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From the comments:
Finn Chitwood
4 years ago
In the words of a brilliant Icelandic magazine: “Viking was a seasonal, temporary occupation, not an ethnicity.”
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January 3, 2022
How did the Greeks and Romans count Years?
toldinstone
Published 31 Dec 2021The AD/CE system we use to date the year was introduced — more or less by accident — during the Middle Ages. Before its invention, the classical world used a wide range of dating systems.
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5:40 Anno Domini
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December 29, 2021
A history of and my first go at MEDIEVAL TENNIS
Lindybeige
Published 28 Sep 2021Thanks to Audible for sponsoring this video. New Audible members get a 30-day free trial. Visit http://audible.com/lindybeige or text “lindybeige” to 500 500 to try Audible today.
Tennis is a very old sport, going back at least to the 1200s. Here I try my hand at it for the very first (but not last) time, and talk about the history of it a bit.
Many thanks to Jesmond Dene Real Tennis Club (https://www.jdrtc.co.uk) where this was shot.
Editing this took a LONG time. We had three cameras recording at the same time, and synching the footage up took an age. The sound consisted mainly of echoing footsteps and ball bounces, and the fact that the main microphone kept glitching did not help (you will notice some of the patches to the sound using other mics, but most I made fairly smooth).
Court map by Atethnekos at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
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December 23, 2021
Cheshire and Durham in the English Parliament
In his end-of-the-year Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes looks at two of the historic counties of England that lacked Parliamentary representation until surprisingly late dates:
Cheshire and Durham (post-medieval boundaries: English county boundaries have varied wildly over the centuries).
Base map by Hogweard at Wikimedia Commons.
England, compared to other parts of Europe, is often said to have been remarkably centralised early on. France, for example, in the late eighteenth century had some thirteen or so regional parliaments, while Britain just had the one. Scotland’s separate parliament was famously dissolved in 1707, with the official union of Scotland with England. Wales gained representation at the English parliament at Westminster from 1536. So far so expected.
But less well-known is that the county of Cheshire — some of it now disappeared under Greater Manchester — used to have an entirely separate parliament of its own, and was not represented at Westminster until 1543. Arguably, it has about as much historical claim to a national assembly today as Wales. Rule of Cheshire was even, very briefly, included among the various titles of the monarch. Richard II, as well as being king of England, was in 1397-99 also styled “Prince of Chester”. He drew his personal bodyguard from among the men of Cheshire too. So whatever happened to Cheshire nationalism?
On a related note: the mantra “no taxation without representation” looms large in the history of American independence. But parts of England itself had gone unrepresented for decades too. County Durham, traditionally ruled by its prince-bishop, was not represented by any MPs in the House of Commons at all until 1654. And as it only gained representation under the revolutionary Protectorate, this was undone upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The county would not be represented again until 1675.
Why? One might argue that the bishop of Durham, who sat in the House of Lords, could be considered its parliamentary representative. But he was not elected, and most importantly had little say over the matter of parliamentary taxation, which was controlled by the Commons. Before 1603 this was not much of an issue, as county Durham was exempt from various taxes because it was near the hostile Scottish border. But the accession of James VI of Scotland to become king of England meant that the hostile border suddenly disappeared. County Durham thus became subject to parliamentary taxation without having any say over those taxes at all — a situation that they then had to bear for over sixty years! Where were the Durham revolutionaries?
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